Features// SPOnG Visits The Arcade Future

Aaah the arcades. Halcyon days! Sweet memories of raiding grannies’ slot machine money on weekends away in Scarborough, Bridlington or (the arcade mecca) Blackpool, to spend glorious hours lost in Asteroids, Star Wars, Outrun or After Burner.

But then, of course, home consoles arrived, we grew up (a little!)… and granny carked it. With PS3s (soon), Wiis all over, and 360s in our living rooms all augmented by a wonderful array of first and third-party arcade gaming peripherals (such as the awesome Pyramat Gaming Chair we’ve been play-testing this week, of which, more anon) what place is there for the modern day arcade in the UK in 2007?

In order to recapture the glory days, I took a trip to the 63rd annual ATEI (Amusement Trades Exhibition International) exhibition at London’s Earl’s Court – billed as “the world’s leading showcase for the gaming, gambling and amusement industries” – to check out what Sega, Konami and Namco Bandai and other major players in the current arcade scene had on offer to ‘the industry’.

I arrived rather late in the day yesterday to grab a few pics and catch-up with the representatives for the above-mentioned, long-standing Japanese arcade brands. Many of the attendees, exhibitors and hired ‘models’ were well into end-of-day-at-trade-show ‘wind-down’ mode. I’ve never seen so many people drinking and smoking so heavily in an exhibition centre; I even had to dodge a few weeing (and that’s not in the good Nintendo way) and puking fellows outside who had clearly overindulged. Truly then, just like Blackpool!

With every theme-park, fairground and arcade owner in Britain converging on Earl's Court, there was always going to be end-of-day carnage. I was not disappointed - the gaming/gambling/amusement industry sure knows how to party!

Wii Controllers?!
Eugene Jarvis, the father of seminal arcade games Defender and Robotron 2084 and currently head of arcade development studio Raw Thrills certainly feels that there is an upturn in the arcade scene of late, informing me that:

But how many of us, as gamers, actually visit our local arcades any more?

Thankfully, the first observation I made as I fought my way through stands littered with coin-counters, prize-grabbers, Lucky Spins, bingo machines and drunken bimbos was that the gaming equipment had all been relocated upstairs this year for the first time. All was much calmer and business-like up there as I skipped around the Sega, Konami and Namco Bandai booths snapping away.

So, what’s new? If you are a hardcore arcade-addict then you were really only there to see one thing – the new and immense, eight-player Outrun cabinet (pictured above) on the Sega booth. You would have been exactly correct to do this – it was, in games/gambling/arcade argot, “ver bollox!”